This Week in Motorsport
The Formula One grid's been turned on its head. Qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix was mad, gloriously mad! Giancarlo Fisichella of Force India, a team that has failed to score a single point in eleven grands prix so far in '09, was the fastest man around the famous (so I am told) Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps. Lewis Hamilton, World Champion in '08, will start in twelfth; Fernando Alonso, World Champion in '05 and '06, will start in thirteenth; and Jenson Button, winner of six of the first seven grands prix of '09, will start in fourteenth (all in a field of twenty cars). Slow pokes ran like greased lightning in qualifying, the best of the best were as slow (always a very relative word in the world of F1) as the rest, and no one has the fogged notion of how it will all play out in the always mercurial weather of Spa, where quite often (again, so I am told) one end of the track will be engulfed in a monsoon while the other end is bathed in blinding sunlight. The Belgian Grand Prix is going to be great!

I would like to entice one or more of you to join me as fans of the F.I.A. Formula One World Championship; so, I thought I might explain a little about how the sport works, to make its complexities seem less Byzantine. There are currently ten teams competing in Formula One, each running two cars. The 2009 World Championship will be determined by the results of seventeen grands prix, starting with the Australian Grand Prix on 29 March and ending with the inaugural Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on 1 November, All Saints Day. And there are actually two separate championships in F1, one for individual drivers, one for the teams, called constructors; both are scored according to the following points system, which only awards points to the top eight finishers among the field of twenty:

1st place = 10 points
2nd place = 8 points
3rd place = 6 points
4th place = 5 points
5th place = 4 points
6th place = 3 points
7th place = 2 points
8th place = 1 point

F1 rules require each team to build its cars in their entirety, with the exceptions of engines and tires. All the teams use identical tires, supplied by Bridgestone, and the supplier also decides beforehand which two of the four grades of dry-weather tires will be used in each grand prix: hard, medium, soft, and super soft. There are also intermediate and full wet-weather tires, available (so it seems, I've yet to see a grand prix run in the ran, though I have high hopes for Spa) purely at the discretion of the teams. Though each team must construct its own car, adhering to scrupulous F.I.A. regulations, of course, there are only five approved engine manufacturers. The ten constructors are listed belong, categorized by which engine manufacturers they use:

B.M.W. engines
B.M.W. Sauber

Ferrari engines
Ferrari
Toro Rosso

Mercedes-Benz engines
Brawn
Force India
McLaren

Renault engines
Red Bull
Renault

Toyota engines
Williams
Toyota

It is interesting to note that so far in the season the Renault-powered RB5 of Red Bull Racing has been scoring far more points than the identically-powered R29 of the Renault factory team. The engines are key, but not as important a determining factor as the chassis built by each constructor and the drivers chosen to sit in the cockpit. (Yep, where the driver sits in an F1 car is called the cockpit.)

There's even so much more detail into which I'd love to delve, because I'm practically gushing with fascination at my newly-discovered love for Formula One, but you've plenty enough to absorb as it stands; so, I'll leave you with only one or two more bits of knowledge. This summer, B.M.W. announced that they are exiting Formula One at the end of the '09 season, leaving only four authorized suppliers of F1 engines. Team USF1, due to begin competition in 2010, is publicly dedicated to have an (almost) all-American team: American designed and built cars, an American pit crew, and American drivers, certainly the most difficult to achieve since only one American has driven in a Formula One grand prix since 1993. Yet USF1 concedes that they will have to field an engine not of American manufacture, an Italian Ferrari, German Mercedes, French Renault, or Japanese Toyota.